


A Thousand Eyes

by This_world_of_beautiful_monsters



Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gang Rape, Miscarriage, Potentially OOC depending on your interpretations of the myths, Predicting Our Future, Rape/Non-con Elements, Second person POV, Suicide, The Gods Suck, Troy should be its own warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-01-30
Packaged: 2021-03-16 03:08:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29075328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/This_world_of_beautiful_monsters/pseuds/This_world_of_beautiful_monsters
Summary: Cassandra gets another chance to tell her story.I read Furies: A Poetry Anthology Of Women Warriors (read it read it read it read it read it!) and was inspired.Title taken from the song by Of Monsters and Men.
Relationships: Agamemnon/Cassandra (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Ajax the Lesser son of Oileus/Cassandra (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Apollo/Cassandra (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Cassandra/Clytemnestra (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Helen of Troy/Paris (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Multiple Non-Consensual Pairings
Comments: 5
Kudos: 12





	A Thousand Eyes

Liar, they called you. Mad, they said. Over the years it was repeated so many times that you became numb, or you thought you were until a fresh spike of pain, fear, humiliation burnt through you.

No matter how times you were proven right, no matter how many times the cow really did burn or the baby meant to be a boy came out a girl, people called it a fluke or some kind of trick. A few even accused you of causing the very mischief you predict, perhaps playing with dark magic in the process, and if your blood wasn't royal it probably would have been spilled in the streets long ago.

Better to be a liar than mad, you supposed. People look carefully at a liar, trying to judge their game, while a mad person is just shrugged at and ignored. Besides, the mad are victims, and you've had quite your full of being a victim. 

(You've seen your sisters--daughters?--in the future, women senselessly consigned to the asylums, bound and shaved and beaten, frozen and tortured and stripped of everything they owned, and cry for them as you cry for so much else)

Here's a truth you never bothered to tell: Apollo took by force what you would not give, left blood crusting on your thighs and a curse burned into your head, his divine seed burning inside you. You were pregnant, but that was one thing you did not fear because you knew it would not last long. The baby left you in a soft stream, red blood tinged with gold.

You were fifteen at the time, you think. You don't know, since age has never really mattered for girls. Before that you were just another maiden, weaving and singing and playing with flowers, dealing with the chaos of your massive family. One day you were going to have a husband but you didn't want one yet, didn't want anyone, and that was the only strange thing about you. (And even if you had wanted anyone, Apollo, all arrogance and babyish gold curls, wouldn't be it)

Then your head was full of broken-glass reflections from a monstrous future and you found yourself huddled in your room, dabbing at bruises and welts from when people tried to beat the "deceptions" and "strangeness" out of you before they gave up. Then you were the family secret, the freakish shadow huddled at the edge of everyone's perception, gracefully ignored.

Oh but _Helenus_ , they believed him. He always told the truth about such small things, what'd you call luck or guesswork half the time if you couldn't see Apollo's taunting shimmer around him--tomorrow's weather, the kill for a week's hunt, trifles that were later blown out of proportion.

He was your twin, your match, the one you once played with more than anyone else and he abandoned you, called you mad the way everyone else did. You strongly suspect he knew all about your gift, but blocked it out of his mind, unwilling to share the spotlight with anyone, or--worse--face the idea that a _woman_ knew more than him.

You told people what he was going to do, but they just accused you of jealousy, beat you and locked you in your room for a week until you finally settled down. Afterwards he came all scowls and false magnanimity, hoping to wring an apology from you....honestly, anyone who really paid _attention_ could have seen how much of a brat he was.

"You won't die in battle, like a hero," you told him. "You'll die fat and old, choking on a boy's cock in a puddle of your own shit. Your betrayals will earn you glory and power, but one wife will hate you and the other will be mad and old, and your children will snicker at your name." Then you walked away smirking, knowing he'd never call you out, never run the risk of putting that image in people's heads even if no one believed you.

A few weeks later, you dropped a bucket of water on his head. He was knocked unconscious, but survived. He couldn't prove it was you, but he moved out of the palace after that, citing visions of his death if he stayed. You'd bribed a servant girl with a secret route to her lover's bedchamber (your visions could be useful at times) to be your alibi, so no one connected it to you.

Of all the deaths you saw, yours was never among them. You weren't sure if that was a rare mercy, or if Apollo simply couldn't see such things, if there were limits to even his vision.

Men liked to hunt for you, deciding that they could use the mad princess, enter a royal cunt for the first time, and get away untouched. You always saw them coming, though, always knew to be where they weren't.

At first you thought this was Apollo protecting what he had declared his, but later....later you kept seeing things not even Apollo knew, kept catching the shimmer of gods where it certainly wasn't expected. Later, you started to wonder.

Yes, it's true that not all of your visions were cruel. Some were just....odd. Like your cleanliness, your strict aversion to the sick, the informercials about staying healthy that you dreamed of. That time you found an old servant collapsed in the hall and found yourself carefully pumping at her chest without knowing why, or the time you used a bizarre maneuver to help a small child expel a bit of food, fleeing in both cases once your "patient" was safe and you could hear the footsteps of help coming.

Mixing in with the nightmares were the stories that hadn't yet been told, the cities that hadn't been built, the great and impossible things that hadn't been them. Some of them were so bizarre you actually ended up doubting yourself at times. But the horrors--oh, you _never_ doubted those. You couldn't.

The night Thetus got married, you woke up screaming, half-mad, mind burnt through with blood and rape. You kept babbling about "The Red Wedding," making a reference several millennia too early.

"A thousand years of sleep," you whispered, trying to communicate through another tale that hadn't been written yet, an older one, with another angry spirit of chaos who disrupted another celebration and left a disproportionate wave of havoc in her wake. "Kingdom in ruins, stripped down to bones and thorns. Bloody red roses. Girls can't get up, can't rise, can't fight."

Even after you collected yourself, as much as you ever are collected, no one believed you, of course. And even when news did come of the disastrous wedding, no one really believed it would lead to anything except a few more heavenly storms.

"Why?" you'd ask the three goddess when they hovered in the palace halls, robes shimmering before your all-seeing eyes. _"Why?"_ Hera turned up her nose and sniffed about her right as queen of the gods, Athena protested the magic of the apple, Aphrodite just smiled and reminded you that love was heartless and all-devouring (she could afford to be cruel, her worshippers were legions beyond the others and always would be).

You'd never bother asking Eris when you saw her, cackling among the wounded and grieving in her chariot. Sometimes you wondered if she had snickered at you, trying and failing to prevent the inevitable.

Here's another secret: you made multiple attempts to kill your brother Paris after he returned home with a spring in his step and blood-red footprints. Goosing his horse (he landed in a cart of hay), poisoning his drink (he got indigestion and survived), setting his bedchambers on fire (the stupid fucking curtains wouldn't catch and the smoke drew attention), trying to kill him (you fought, he woke up screaming about nightmares, and you barely managed to get out of there before the servants arrived). You couldn't decide if Apollo was playing with you or you were just a particularly shitty assassin.

Before he left to claim his bride, you finally pulled him close and begged him not to marry her. "The city will burn," you'd whispered. "We'll lose everything."

"It'll be fine, Cass," he said, patting your head absentmindedly.

He left and came back with Helen, she of the ruby-gold hair and sapphire eyes, she of snowy white perfection, she who has been talked so so so very much (Helen of Troy, why do they call her that? It's not like she was born there. It should have been Paris of Troy and Helen, really). You wondered if the daughter she'd left behind was as beautiful, or if she'd been blessed with her father's homely face.

You didn't bother trying to kill her--at this point, it would probably just make things worse. Besides, you knew what so few people did, that her "face that launched a thousand ships" was just a smaller reflection of the twisted trade deals and political maneuverings of men who needed an excuse to start your war.

She was the linchpin, though, and at times you glimpsed blood clotted in her hair, so getting close was difficult. But she was beautiful, _so_ beautiful, and you'd still find your breath catching when she suddenly stepped into view.

It was the same kind of attraction you saw in many of the men and quite a few of the women, the same lust-tinged admiration you'd felt for various women over the years (but you didn't love her, not when the beauty could so quickly break to gore before your eyes, the future an underserved shadow over her head)

It dawned on you that you'd felt what you saw You dreamed of a future where there was a term for what you are, and it comforted you more than "princess" or "madwomen" or even "prophetess" did. No one noticed when you started weaving rainbows into your clothing, but it made you smile anyway.

A few nights after Helen arrived, you dreamed of Iphigenia dragged through a crowd of men, kicking and screaming. They murmured to each other about how what a fool she was making of herself for not going to her death with dignity, while at the same time admiring her body through the slip. Achilles the hero stood by, face blank and dead.

"They'll die wretched deaths," you whispered in her ear, hoping she could hear you, before the knife came down. The gods changed her into a doe when she died, as if that meant anything. You saw a river of blood running into the distance, towards her home, the promise of more carnage to come from both directions.

"They're coming," you told your mother over breakfast, almost absentmindedly, and went back to humming a jingle you'd heard in your dreams.

And then...then the war. Then the gore. Then the fields full of corpses, hospitals full of the sick and the mad. The men of Greece poured themselves into this fight, thousands of sons and brothers and husbands and fathers torn to nothing in the name of glory. But the _big_ heroes survived, the Achilles and the Hectors and the Ajaxes ( _fucking_ Ajax), so what did anyone else in power care, really?

You huddled on your bed, shaking, squeezing your eyes shut and pressing your hands to your ears as if that could drown out the fire in your head. Troy burned around you, over and over again, until a wicked part of you almost wished it would happen already just to get it over with.

On occasions you saw the ghosts of future archaeologists picking their way through the streets, drifting through the markets and shops. They were the ones who told you that this wasn't even the first Troy, perhaps not even the last.

"This has all happened before," you told Hector's wife Andromache once. "Troy fell and burned and rose again, over and over." You could never decide if that was hopeful or depressing, maybe a sign of something rotten at the island's core.

Everyone settled in for the long, dirty decade, even if most people didn't suspect it would be a decade. Helen got pregnant, once, but lost it before she had the courage to tell anyone. You wondered if perhaps life wasn't allowed to take root in something so beautiful, if her divine father had forbidden it.

Time passed. There were starving children wandering the streets, widows scorned for being forced to whore themselves, suicides by the last survivors of broken families. Hunger slipped into the castle sometimes, an ugly reflection of how much worse it would be in the poorer quarters.

There were riots, sometimes, demand for an end to the war, only for them to be brutally suppressed by soldiers who loved the opportunity to kill, kill, kill. You wondered if they were doing the same at the home of the Greeks.

On the battlefield you saw gods, weapons blurring. You wished with all your heart to be deadly and agile like Artemis, to be clever and fierce like Athena. But you had to settle for huddling by the heart, peering in at Hestia as she curled in the flames, and quietly weep while she stroked your tears with invisible fingers. She was the goddess of hearth and home; she had one of the biggest hearts, and the smallest ability to act on it. When fire sparks and pops, it's from her sobs.

Paris became more of a brat than ever before, Hector racked up the body count, and Achilles haunted everyone's nightmares against yours, because you knew he would fall eventually. Helen grew wan and moved little, still beautiful in her misery. You had dreams of cuts and burns appearing on her perfect skin and slipped into her chambers at night, stealing her knives, candles, and needles.

She asked to be allowed to go home, once, and was beaten for it. You found her sitting at a window once and came up besides her, sitting in silence, both waiting to see if she would jump. For whatever reason, she didn't.

To stay sane, in some shape or form, you wove. You made pictures of men and women whose great-time-a-thousand-grandparents hadn't been born yet, you spun tapestries of planets and islands that hadn't been discovered yet. You made the logos for a dozen of what they would call "TV shows," recreated the Empire State Building for the first time, spun the flags of unborn countries and societies for equality or preservation or anarchy. You wove the patterns for every element of the LGBTQIA spectrum, relishing the precious nature of each color.

You made the horrors solid, too, spelled out the fates of everyone you loved in red and black thread. The cloth, at least, would listen to you.

Sometimes, after a particularly terrible nightmare, you prayed--not to the gods, who'd done you so wrong and would do worse in the future, but to the people of the future, the ones who might actually change things. You prayed to Susan B. Anthony, Gloria Steinem, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Martin Luther King, Malala Yousafzai, Mother Teresa, Toni Morrison, the creators of Wonder Woman. They couldn't help you, but at least they wouldn't mockingly dangle help and pull it away at the last minute the way the gods did.

As the war approached a climax only you could see, you had more and more visions of the horrors that were to come, more and more sleepless nights. You told your brothers exactly what they needed to do to survive, but they slapped you or laughed at you.

Apollo came to you, once, perfect and golden as he had ever been. "Are you happy, Cassandra?" he asked, perfect lips twisted in a mocking smile. "Are you grateful for my gift?"

You didn't bother to look at him. "They won't worship you forever," you told him. "Not in the numbers they do now, anyway. The masses will _remember_ you sure, they'll tell funny little stories, but they won't give you any more offerings. Most won't pray to you, won't swear by you, won't ask you for mercy or aid. And the ones who remember won't build temples, won't give you the free reign you crave."

His face went pale, twisted with shock. "You--you insolent _cunt_ , you're _mad_ to think--"

"You know, don't you?" you asked, still peering out the window. "You _saw_ , and you couldn't change it no matter how hard you tried. Olympus won't fall, it'll just melt into nothing. Men and women will travel higher than you ever have with your precious chariot, on wings they built themselves, and they won't find a trace of you."

" _Liar,"_ Apollo spat, hands shaking. "I--I'll--you'll _burn_ for this."

When you finally deigned to face him, your chin was high and your voice was clear. "I'll burn, perhaps, but not by your hand. You poured too much of your power into me, Apollo, more than you intended. If you hurt me, who knows what'll happen to your own precious gifts?" You were bluffing, and he knew it, but you also knew he would take the risk.

Apollo's eyes flared and you squeezed yours shut right before a bright flash went up behind your lids. When he was gone, there was a smoking dark stain on the floor, bitter in your throat.

You dreamed of him later on, of the havoc he wreaked on the request of one of his priests, desperate to prove to himself that he had some power. You saw what he made the man's daughter do out of "gratitude," claiming that she'd already been ruined by the Greek soldiers. You couldn't wait for his fall.

The others celebrated when they saw the sickness in the Greek's ranks, when they heard the rumors of chaos and discord among the leaders, but you knew what was coming. You didn't smile. After all these years of waiting for the war to end, you wished you could wait a little longer.

You thought about running, binding your breasts, cutting your hair, and sneaking away on a ship--who would miss you? But ships of Troy were long since ruined and the trade had flickered out now that so many of the city's efforts were being poured into war. Besides, you didn't really have anywhere to go, anywhere to provide proper refuge for a lunatic who woke up screaming every night these days.

Hector went out to fight a man in Achilles' armor, and you chased after him when he ignored your whispers, begging to be heard. "It's not Achilles!" you screamed. "It's Patrocles! You can't kill him, you'll just bring Achilles back!" He ignored you, he died, and you plugged your fingers in your ears before Andromache even started to scream.

You stood on the battlements with Paris as he drew his arrow, soft fingers shaking on the string. He'd grown pale and fat from years of cowering in his tower, eyes half-mad with guilt and fear, just like Helen's. "Aim a little lower," you murmured, and his hand jerked in surprise, the arrow sinking into Achilles' heel.

Later on, he was dead. Helen cried, although not as much as she could have. She was married off to someone else, her eyes blank and tired. You watched Helenus flee in the castle in a huff, pausing to throw up in the courtyard; you'd tried to kill him again, dumping poison in his food, but that pathetic vision of his had given him just enough warning to not let him eat too much.

You wept when you saw the horse and they mocked you for it, called you crazy, an attention-seeker, Apollo's slut. You tried to burn it while everybody was watching Lacoon and his sons (poor things) die, but every fire you tried to strike was drenched by an impossible spray from the shore or a spatter of rain from above. Like you, the gods wanted this over with. Unlike you, they had no compunctions about how it happened.

They dragged you away from that wretched horse and locked you in your room while you celebrated. You screamed as you hadn't screamed in so long, pounding your fists bloody on the walls. You ripped your stupid fucking tapestries to shreds, because what use was even the brightest distant future or the most perfect reproduction of the coming threat now? Not for the first time, you thought about ending yourself, but the fear of death--the one thing you couldn't see--kept you from it.

So many times you'd been right, and still no one listened. You didn't even think Apollo had to mess with their heads; people are perfectly willing to disbelieve a woman on their own.

When the end came, it came with the roar of fire and building shouts in the distance, a wind building into a hurricane. It came with frantic shouts, soldiers staggering out of their drunken hazes with their armor on backward, children crying, women screaming screaming screaming screaming.

You heard the footsteps pounding down the hall. You heard your brothers being gutted, your sisters and nieces (and nephews) being raped. And the servants, the servants were brutalized too, and you wept for them along with the others because why not? You had plenty of tears to spare.

When someone threw one of your cousins through the door, a trail of smoke followed him into the room. You ran through a hall of blood and fire, the one you'd dreamed of so many times before. You saw a man hunched over one of your sisters and grabbed his dagger, cut his throat.

You took her by the hand and dragged her through the walls, until you found yourselves swept up into a crowd and dragged into an inner chamber where the women had hidden with your old father. It was a tangle of sweaty bodies and ear-piercing wails, the smell of fear-piss and tears....the unmistakable stench of poison. the thump of bodies hitting the floor in piles of shit and foam. The sister you'd tried to save grabbed your dagger and dragged it across her throat just as the soldiers kicked the doors down.

They ran your father through, and while they were laughing over his corpse you took the opportunity to run. You twisted and bit free of their grasping hands, staggering out into the courtyard...the courtyard, the courtyard, if you had words to describe the darkest depths of hell you might have ones for that courtyard.

Your feet squashed in guts as you ran, and ugly moans in your ears. You saw a woman's face shoved into her son's corpse as she was raped, saw a small boy split in half by a war-maddened cock, saw mothers and daughters reach for each other as they were raped, the blood of their loved ones staining their shaking breasts.

Ajax saw you there, in that courtyard. He declared you his, called "dibs" as the kids say, and men were closing in on every side. You knew your luck had run out, but you still tried to flee, bolted to the shrine of Athena even though you _knew_ she wouldn't do jack shit it to save you. This had been one of your earliest visions, being raped in that temple, and the first time you had it you weren't able to speak for a month.

But you had nowhere else to go and besides, at least this way you would remembered, wouldn't be swallowed up like so many other women were in the chaos. A petty, selfish thing perhaps, but you needed _something._

So you ran. He pinned you down, hurt you, left you bleeding again. The first time in no way prepared you for the second, and neither did your visions.

Ajax left bruises on your skin like poisonous flowers, with vines of flowing blood and teeth marks for hours. He called you cumdump, slut, whore, crazy fucking bitch who probably loved this. He passed you around to his men, lowborn soldiers not even worthy of mention in the history books, but that didn't make it hurt any less. Then he took you again.

"You'll die," you whispered to him through bruised lips as he ripped apart your insides. "You'll drown, and it'll hurt, it'll be like fire in your bowels and a hell-storm in your brain." He hit you again and thrust harder.

You told his men the same thing. "You'll drown. You'll drown. You'll drown." None of them listened, but you could closed your eyes as they hurt you and imagined fish nibbling at their cocks.

Knowing that wouldn't help with the shaking and nightmares and the memories of hands on your body as you tried to live your life in the aftermath, anymore than of Apollo's fall hadn't help after him, but it did something. It kept you from cutting your throat on the fractured edges of the shrine, at least.

Afterwards, when the chaos had died down in the cold gray light of morning, Odysseus helped you up. He hadn't joined in, tried to stop Ajax in fact, but he hadn't done anything to stop it. And it was _his_ stupid fucking plan that brought about this horror in the first place.

"I've seen you fight, you know," you whispered. "You're as clever off the battlefield as on it. You could have taken Ajax, and his men would have stood down, too. But you didn't want to risk getting punished with a smaller cut of the plunder, did you?"

He stiffened. "I--"

"Save it," you muttered. "There's barely anything there, anyway. It was all melted down for the war." You hissed with pain as you hobbled out of the temple, into the wreckage of Troy. "It'll take a decade for you to get home," you told him. "You'll suffer more than you imagined possible, and at the end not even your wife would acknowledge you."

Then manacles were clamped on your friends and you were led away, into the ashes of your home. It was painfully quiet, except for the sobbing and groans of pain, sounds occasionally ended by the harsh cut of a sword. And of course there were still the familiar sounds of moans and slapping flesh, the sound of men taking their last pleasure before the captives were officially divided up.

You saw Helen that day, drifting along at her old husband's side. She was unbound, but blood trickled from between her legs and her fair skin was mottled with bruises. You wondered how many men Menelaus had given her too before deigning to claim her again. Those who say she was not punished for her role as scapegoat in the war are lying.

In the shadows you saw Apollo smirking and flipped him off, not caring that he wouldn't understand the gesture. You sat with your sisters, their eyes blank and dead, and didn't bother talking. Who wanted to receive comfort from mad Cassandra? Anything you said would just be taken as an "I told you so," the worst kind of cruelty.

There was a fuss when it was discovered what Ajax had done--or, rather, where he'd done it. The big, brave man cowered at the very altar he'd just desecrated, helping like the spoiled child he was. The Greeks stood there with fresh blood on their cocks and burned children in their lungs, talking about _piety._ Talking about _honor,_ about _respect_ and _forgiveness._

Motherfucking hypocrites. Not that the Trojans would have been any better if their positions were reversed.

So Ajax was allowed to live another day, to march smirking to a watery grave, and the captives were divided up. Agammenon approaches and you freeze, vision spotted with Iphigenia's blood. He weaves his fingers through your hair, dark and loose like the daughter he butchered, and smirks at the fear in your eyes, not knowing where it comes from. He drags you away, into his tent.

"I saw what you did to your daughter," you say, as soon as you're alone. "You'll die just like she did, choking on your own blood." He hit you and raped you, ramming into your damaged body. You passed out from the pain, his teeth flashing in your blood-streaked vision.

He didn't get rid of you, though--far be it from him to admit his fear of a _woman._ He hauled you aboard his ship in chains, and from the deck you watched the last of your family drift away as you left the place you'd lived all your life for the first and last time. The ash still hung heavy in the air, and you could hear the wails of your loved ones as they were dragged away. You were too tired and in too much pain to join in.

You spent most of your time chained up in his quarters, doing your best to clean the blood and cum out of your body, trying to avoid infections or--worse--pregnancy. It hurt every time he bedded you, but at least you were safe from his men, unlike the girls you could hear wailing through the ship. Your dreams shifted between their nightmares of the past and occasional soothing glimpses of the future.

But the future was...confusing, for once. You knew it would end in blood, as you'd told Agammenon, but you couldn't see how it was shed. It was a blank spot, just like your own death, and you wondered if the two were connected.

You also wondered at the new queen you dreamed of, dark eyes bright and fierce, struggling to navigate her new reign and protect her children. You thought she might be a widow of a fallen Grecian, but there were many of those. Why did she matter so much? And why were her eyes so hypnotically bright?

And then, a few days from land, you saw why the woman mattered. And at the same time, you saw Agammenon's end. You saw his wife facing you, shadows in her eyes, and suspected what might come next.

A part of you wanted to run, scream, jump overboard. A part of you welcomed the idea of someone doing for you what you could not do for yourself. In the end you said nothing to Agammenon, because even if he wouldn't believe you you didn't want to give him a chance of anticipating what was coming.

At the end of the voyage you stumbled off the boat on shaky legs, wrists bruised and raw from weeks in manacles. Agammenon dumped you in the antechambers and went off to take a bath, muttering about calling for you when he's through with his wife. You crouched against the wall, winding your fingers together, and waited.

A few minutes later you heard the screaming, the gurgling and shouting and rending of flesh. Killing someone with an axe is a lost messier than it sounds.

You rose to your feet and marched down the hall, knowing you'd never get out of the palace before the guards who'd seen you brought in chained found you, knowing there was nothing left for you. You didn't particularly want to die, but you'd been through much crueler things than death, and you did not fear what was coming.

When you met Clytemnestra she was slick with her husband's blood, standing over his tub with an axe in hand, heaving with exhilaration and exhaustion and terror. A vision flickered into your mind of a red-streaked girl on a stage in a party dress, havoc at her feet, a comparison no one from your time would ever understand.

She looked up and started at the sight of you, axe almost slipping from your grip before she tightened you. "You, you're the slave, right? The mad princess?" Her voice shook slightly, her eyes narrowing as she recognizes the total lack of shock on your face.

"My name's Cassandra," you replied, peering down at the bloody ruin that used to be a warrior. "I saw what he did to your daughter."

She frowned. "You--you did?"

You frowned back, because _this,_ this was new. People usually accused you of lying on the spot; in fact, you couldn't remember the last time anyone actually _asked_ you a question regarding your visions, unless they were asking whether you'd given up on your fantasies yet.

You peered at her, at the axe in her hand, at the sins on her soul and the dark ideas in your mind. "One of your husband's subordinates will make a land a few miles from here," you told her. "He'll see that you're alone, without a man, and he'll seize the opportunity. If you attack tonight, you can wipe him out before he even knows there's a danger."

She pulled the axe to her chest, as if seeking protection from it. "Why should I believe you?" she asked, trying to straighten her shoulders.

You shrugged. "I don't know. No one else does."

She glanced down at the body of her feet. "You saw this coming? But you didn't tell him?"

"He wouldn't have believed me," you reminded her. "I told me he was going to die, didn't tell him how." You knelt, ruin a finger along Agammenon's ravaged brow. "Are you going to kill me?" you ask.

For a few minutes she stood there, thinking. Then she sets the axe down and turns away. "I'm taking a bath," she mumbled, tugging on her husband's corpse. "You can sleep in his room if you want. We can talk later, plan for war."

You gaped for a few seconds, then slowly drifted forward to help her tug out the corpse and lower it to the ground. "Why?" you asked, not able to meet her eyes. You hadn't felt surprised in over a _decade_ , and it's a stunning feeling....but not an entirely unwelcome one.

"A soothsayer told me not to send Iphigenia to join her father," she murmured, not meeting your eyes. "I didn't believe her. I made a mistake." She looked up at you, and it dawned on you how very beautiful her eyes were.

"Thank you," you whispered, fingers trembling as you reached out to squeeze her hand, not caring about the blood. "Thank you so _much."_

Electra is small and serious at twelve, so like Iphigenia you don't know how Clytemnestra bears it. "Is the man who killed Sister gone?" she asks. Like the servants, she understands Clytemnestra's side of things.

"She is," Clytemnestra says, stroking her hair.

"Who's that?" Orestes asks, pointing at you. It's the day after Clytemnestra's forces wiped out the subordinate, seeking revenge for the gruesome murder of their king by one of the other man's assassins.

Orestes is in charge now, although his mother will rule for him, teach him to listen to _her_ for once. Men will try to turn him against her, or simply try to get rid of him. They'll fail. You can see it.

"A friend," Clytemnestra says, stroking his hair. You hope you'll be worthy of the term. It's been so long since you hoped. 

The children grow to trust you over the years you spend in their house, helping their mother run a kingdom from their dead father's chambers. You give her your prophecies, and some of your own ideas. You bounce plans back and forth while you're supposed to be weaving. She lets you sprawl on the floor as your body heals from abuse, talking about everything and nothing.

When the children are older you will bring them in to listen to you, to learn from you. Electra will probably be married one day, hopefully close by, but before then you will make her into a good queen, and Orestes into a sane king.

You tell them all stories of the future, of women doing all the things men can do, of people speeding down the road in metal chariots, of great countries and beautiful artwork and mankind traversing the stars. You give them snippets of stories that haven't been told that, tell them girls in flying houses and boys in dark batsuits.

You doubt the children believe you, but at least they'll have beautiful stories to tell their children. At least Electra will know she has value about the waist and tell her daughters the same, in a way no one ever taught you or Clytemnestra or Helen.

Clytemnestra--or Nestra, as you start to call her--might believe you, and she might not. But she listens to all your stories, even the dark ones that you tell only her, of the wars that will make what happened at Troy look like a children's squabble, of the cruelty standing side by side with beauty. "It sounds ugly enough to be real," she murmurs, stroking your hair.

She starts touching you more in later years, and you find yourself responding. She is softer than the hands of the men who have bruised you in the past, slower. Her mind is sharp and her wit is clever, and she calls you things you've never heard from anyone: gifted, dangerous, striking.

It's your choice to slip into Nestra's bed one night, and she lets you. You touch her in the way you've glimpsed future women touch each, learning new things about each other's bodies. You panic when you have an orgasm, your first ever, but she talks you through it (you have many more).

You both wake up screaming sometimes, but you always wake up together. You both hear cruel words, and then you punish the speakers before comforting each other. Total healing is impossible, but you grow stronger. You still dream of bad things, but the past can't touch you anymore, and any nightmares about the future do not touch on your own life. 

Orestes and Electra grow up healthy and good--Orestes learns to be soft, and Electra learns to be strong. They marry people who deserve them, and you teach Orestes' new wife the same lessons you taught Electra.

Electra is just a horse's ride away, riding in man's clothes and the sword you insisted she learn to use. She's a good rider, with a husband who likes men and doesn't really care where she goes as long as she doesn't get pregnant, letting Electra run free with the people she loves until she has to return to her royal duties.

There are grandchildren. There are fallen enemies rising quietly at your and Nestra's feet. There is a little bit of peace in this mad, bloody world of monsters human and divine. The gods no longer deign to visit you, not even Apollo, and you are grateful for that.

You do not tell them the lies that will be told about you one day. You do not say how brutally Orestes and Electra's roles will be twisted, the fate they envision for you and Clym, the ridiculous focus there will be on Aegisthus, the scion of a dysfunctional family who was raised by shepherds and stayed there, where he belonged.

This knowledge hurts, but it refuses to let it spoil for what you and Nestra have built for yourselves. You will take what you have, and hold on to it with iron fingers. You will weave your story, your visions, and even if no one understands the tapestries after you are dead _you_ and your family will know the truth, and that is all that matters.

You are not gods, after all. You are defined by no one's words, but your own.


End file.
